First off, a TED talk :

Loved this one. Much genuine wisdom (backed up by hard science, even!), hilarious self-effacing humour, a charmingly candid speaker who looks a little like Caroline Rhea, and of course, much food for thought.

First off, I will get a few things off my mind about the talk itself, then I will go into my own line of thought springing from it.

And this one I have to get off my chest right away because it is burning a hole in my mind : “What cannot be measures does not exist”? What a massive load of crap! That just limits human knowledge to what we currently know how to measure. Radioactivity existed before the Geiger counter, heat existed before the thermometer, and there are things between Heaven and Earth that are beyond our philosophies. I find that kind of philosophical corner-cutting for people who cannot handle the qualitative and abstract to be completely intolerable. It is the worst kind of intellectual laziness and cowardice, because it pretends to be about being logical and sensible and scientific, but it is merely a product of small minds pretending big things will go away if they ignore them.

The other thing that struck me about her talk is when she speaks about how she set out to figure out these big and very important questions of psychology and philosophy with her “measuring stick”. Doing thousands of interviews, collating reams of data, trying to deduce a pattern from thousands of data points. All very proper and according to the rules.

Me, I just would have thought about it.

That is the difference between two very different mindsets, hers and mine. I greatly admires hers, and certainly cannot argue with the quality of her results. What is more, she can prove her results via rigorous science, whereas I, like Freud, have absolutely no data to back me up. I am a thinker, not a scholar. I expect people to examine my reasoning and decide for themselves if they think it rings true. Proof does not really enter into it.

The two mindsets are complementary if not forced into opposition by some myopic false binary. Some of us are thinkers and dreamers, and others are builders and makers. Some of us find truth by examining reality and drawing conclusions afterwards, and some of us think up ideas, test them for internal consistency, and only then compare them to the world.

You need both.

Nits picked, we are on to me thought about the actual substance of the talk. I loved it when she said that you cannot selectively suppress emotion. I have believed this for a long time, but it is also provable by modern brain science. There is no selective emotional filter circuit. You cannot let the good ones in and keep the bad ones out. You can only turn the volume down or up.

If if you, one some level, decide “I would rather feel nothing than feel this”, then do not be surprised if you find your life very depressing and grey and unrewarding.

Our ability to suppress our emotions is vitally necessary, of course, otherwise we would act on every single emotion without thinking and we would be less sentient than our pets. Even a dog can resist going for the steak on the table if he thinks he will get in trouble.

But like all things, emotional suppression has to be done in a balanced and reasonable way. Too much, and the vital balance of pain and reward is lost, and the person becomes depressed, perhaps clinically. The person comes to rely on the diminishing returns of a vicious emotional suppression cycle, where the suppression brings pain, which brings on further suppression to deal with the pain, which then leads to even more emotional starvation, and more pain, and so on and so forth.

Soon, the person has their emotional volume control down so low that they are barely making it through the day, and yet, the idea that it is the emotional suppression that is the problem is more than a little counterintuitive. After all, if you are depressed, it seems like it is emotions which are the problem, especially if you are prone to intellectualizing your emotions.

All this applies especially to dysthymic depression, the “hugging the baseline” depression. No big highs, no big lows, just a very constrained existence with very low functionality.

The other observation that she made, although sadly not till the very end of her talk, is the one about the difference between happy people and sad people is that people who were happy felt that they were “enough”. That they, in and of themselves, were sufficient.

This is an issue I have wrestled with myself. I have a great many gifts and talents, and yet I constantly feel as if I am “not enough”. That no matter what I can list in the “assets” column of my self worth spreadsheet, it somehow always come out to a big net loss in the end.

So where does this sense of insufficiency (or sufficiency) come from? And does self-worth stem from a self or worthiness, or vice versa?

To me, it is entirely possible that on some level, for a depressive like myself, the overwhelming feeling of unworthiness comes from the depression. The feeling that you are a “bag dog”, that if you feel this bad, it must be because you “did something wrong”, and hence deserve it.

It might be that, for whatever reason, no matter how hard a depressive strives to have a free and open mind, the depression have such a powerful distorting effect on the mind that it forces them to reach the same false conclusions as every other depressive.

We think we are figuring things out and basing our emotions on our conclusions, but in reality, we are just working backwards from the emotions and constructing elaborate systems of thought to justify them.

And with that happy thought, my comments conclude.

– Self worth = “enough”
– Strength in vulnerability = the way out is the way in
– Tear down The Wall